The Deep Dark Sleep

I shrugged. ‘It’s no skin off my nose to point out this guy, whoever he is, but I really don’t think I’m going to get within a country mile of finding out who he is.’ I paused for a moment.

‘What is it?’ asked Cohen.

I shook my head. ‘No … it’s nothing. It’s just that the morning after I started asking around about Strachan I had a brief encounter with a heavy and a thirty-eight in the fog. And this guy was good. Professional. He wanted to scare me off looking into Strachan’s disappearance.’

‘So why couldn’t it be Strachan’s lad?’

‘Too young. I mean it could be, but it would make him only seventeen or eighteen or thereabouts at the time of the robberies. Too much of a lad. Especially to work as an enforcer.’

‘When I was eighteen I could malky any bastard that got in my way.’ The pride was apparent in Murphy’s voice.

‘I’m sure you could,’ I said. ‘I don’t know … it just doesn’t feel right.’

‘Yet you say this guy was after you to put the frighteners on and get you to drop the Joe Strachan thing?’ asked Cohen.

I thought about it for a moment. It was a stretch with age, but I hadn’t gotten that good a look at the guy. He could have been five years older. Three years older. It would be enough.

‘I tell you what,’ I said. ‘If he is the Lad, then I’ll serve him up to you on a platter, with pleasure.’ Then I added, just for clarity: ‘But I’ll still take the two thousand.’

CHAPTER NINE

To say that Glasgow was a city of paradoxes is like saying the North Pole can be chilly. Everywhere you looked, everything about the city seemed to contradict itself and everything else. It was a bustling, densely populated, fuming, noisy, brash industrial city; yet, if you travelled fifteen minutes in any direction, you found yourself in vast, empty landscapes of moorland, hill and glen. It was a city defined by its people, and its people were defined by Glasgow: yet, that same small distance away, the Glaswegian identity gave way to a different type of Scottishness. In the direction Archie and I drove, it became increasingly a Highland identity.

The country estate on which Billy Dunbar worked was remote and dramatic, covering mountains, pasture and the odd salmon-stocked loch. I enjoyed getting out of the city and into this kind of landscape whenever I could, and had often driven up past the shores of Loch Lomond and stopped off at some lochside tea shop. I did have my contemplative moments – when I wasn’t peeping on adulterous spouses, slapping people about or hobnobbing with gangsters.

As I drove, I thought about my meeting with Handsome Jonny Cohen and Hammer Murphy. Before I left, I had asked Murphy about his younger days when he had worked with Gentleman Joe Strachan. He hadn’t been able to tell me much, but if he had omitted the word ‘fuck’ and all its derivatives, it would have taken half as long to tell me. But the picture I had come away with was of a Joe Strachan whom Murphy had been, and remained, incapable of understanding, as if he existed on a completely different criminal plane. Murphy had done a few jobs for Strachan, but they had always been in connection with something else that Murphy had never known about, like working on one corner of a painting without being allowed to see the whole canvas. This is, of course, my analogy. Murphy had described it as ‘being kept in the fucking dark and knowing fuck all about fuck all that was fucking going on’.

It took Archie and me several stops at remote petrol stations and post offices before we found our way to the estate office. Mr Dunbar, we were told by the tweedy spinster type we found in the office, was the deputy head gamekeeper. Eyeing us with that kind of keen suspicion that only comes from a long lifetime’s experience of virginity, she asked us the nature of our business with Mr Dunbar. I decided to christen her Miss Marple.

I told her that we were insurance agents and had papers for Mr Dunbar to sign. What kind of insurance we could be selling a gamekeeper beat me, other than perhaps cover against pheasant-related injury; but she seemed satisfied with the explanation and told us he was not on duty that day but we could find him at his cottage on the estate, to which she gave us directions.